I intend to try once the pc version comes out (It'll be free and on stronger tech). However it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that the game was very very far from perfect. Gameplay videos, reviews, and screenshots are things we can use to judge a game. 

This sounds very much like the first Xenoblade. Which I was alright with. The over-world is designed around getting good views of the landscape I am assuming (particularly from the preview videos), very much like the first one. Are there secret areas that reward you with experience when you find them? Do collectibles return? In the first game, much of the NPC interactions were in the main cities (Colony 9, Colony 6, and Alcamoth.) I was alright with that because it allowed them to focus on the character interactions there while allowing for world exploration elsewhere.  I think with a mission/hub based system there is also an advantage in that you have a sort of direction, whereas Bethesda games are sandboxes that do things differently and thus benefit more from dense areas where people have many choices of what to do. If one thinks of Xenoblade as a sort of off-line MMORPG it is easy to understand how the world was designed. 

A large portion of skyrims map is both the upper surface and underground, over multiple levels, and again, I stated that based on scale design the map for skyrim is bigger, which it is, the map for XCX is bigger in viewport scale.

To put it another way, if you played Skyrim as a chicken, the map would be much, much larger but only as a result of the distance vs time conversion, XCX distance vs time conversion is distorted by reducing the size of the player character, to maximise the "feel" of the world map without straining the hardware as much.

To again put it another way, and more accurately. Game vs Game, XCX is larger than Skyrim, Complexity vs Complexity, Skyrims map is roughly 2x the complexity despite being roughly 15 sq km as apposed to 44-ish sq ml in XCX, and that's only counting overworld, not all of the dungeons and building interiors - something XCX does not have anywhere except for blade home.

As I said months ago in my tech review, XCX employs the usual trickery of F2P MMO's in that the landmass geometry is expanded/player character shrunk to give the effect of a larger world, a move that made sense both as a technical restriction and to accomodate Dolls later in the game, so no, I'm not lying, I am explaining things from a technical perspective.

To you it's going to be a case of "well its bigger than skyrim!" and you would be right, but to me, teh technical aspect of WHY it's larger intervines and the purpose of epxanding the world mesh to suit the dolls / increase the perceived world size is have for me, to overlook.

There are some hidden areas but these are generally very small, and not very interesting, they just have "chests" (fallen dolls) that have a level requirement to unlock, beyond that there isnt much reason to explore beyond activating fast travel points or hunting quest enemies.

As for the offline mmo thing, read my previous comment, it's very much what i basically stated.

Oh I wasn't disputing your claim that the world area is 301 km^2 nor that the land area is even much smaller than that. Just that in comparison to Skyrim (which tends to be the metric these days) it takes a similar amount of time to travel across just three of five continents along a short path in XBC:X that it does to travel across Skyrim along an average path. Considering that our brains (at least mine) accomodate for changes in speed when determining world scale, this allows some people (not all) to get a sense of how big the world is relative to other games. This of course says nothing of world density, which you noted in your other posts, but I think that is a matter of different design philosophy and the intent of the game. 

Overall it's a good game, if it wasn't I wouldn't have called it my "best game of the generation so far" when it launched, (isn't anymore, in my opinion). but my main drive to play it as much as I did was to get a Doll, then once I got one, it was unlocking the flight unit, once I had that, there was next to no reason to continue playing as you aren't really rewarded to keep pushing forward anymore - sure theres higher level monsters roaming the world that you can try to kill, but even if you do, you just reach a point where you no longer care to.

And when you reach that point, you look back at the journey you took to get there, and it just ends up feeling like one big grindfest, much like pretty much every MMO. In part because the storyline itself is really forgettable and the personalities of the characters in the game just don't fit well together, you never feel like you really give a shit about any of them, and without a form of attachment towards them the story just floats on by as an anouyance between completing a mission and starting the next.

I guess i'm hard on it because i want, badly, to love the game, because I see the potential it could have had, but that potential being wasted and so many poor design choices becoming glaringly obvious as you play that I feel like the games a bit of a let down.

The worst part is the combat system, honestly, your immediate instinct when in a fight is to run behind a boulder, fence, building or tree for some cover from the enemies attack, but it does nothing, so long as you are engaged in battle mode the enemy can attack you regardless of your distance from them, or what obstruction is between you and the enemy, once you realize that, the battles just become quite dull, because theres little to no reason to even move much anymore.

I understand that you use that pov as a developer and what you say makes sense, but here we were never speaking about the size of the game in relation to the complexity of the map and many other variables, we were talking about size, period, what the developers have made to achieve that size it was irrelevant in this conversation and you knew it, yet you lied, and you have done this several times to me. You always twist everything at the end until it looks like you doesn´t, but you do. I asked you "is the massland bigger than Skyrim", you said, no. When after your analysis, is indeed like x3 or x4 times the size.

And you know it. This is not the first time.

Considering the absolute majority of the posters on these boards have not played it. And most, like you, havent spoiled them self either I think it's quite okay to be hyped about the things we know of.

Lets look at that reply again, and bold the pertinent bits.

If you understand what i say then why are you picking bones over an accurate answer, the world map was designed to accomodate the dolls, scaled to the dolls the map of XCX is both smaller and less detailed than Skyrim, the player characters in XCX are not what the overworld geometry was designed to accomodate, prefab structures dotted around the map are designed to accomodate the player outside of the doll, the overworld itself is designed to accomodate the doll.

In skyrim/fallout 3/nv/witcher, the overworld map is designed to accomodate the player character and the player character only.

Also, my response of simply "No" was a result of you asking if it was bigger than several games, both Witcher 3 and Fallout 3 are larger, as for Fallout 3, view this map, it's an overlay of game world in google maps which shows the accurate distances involved.

But lets dig on those other supposed lies shall we.

View this image to see why the draw distance isn't impressive - yes, low level LOD are dispayed well, but the distance at which higher LOD is loaded and at which large structures are loaded is terrible, when sprinting between areas it's sometimes possible to run into an invisible object while the engine tries it's best to catch up then suddenly load a building in front of you that wasnt there a second ago.

The draw distance suffers as a result because the low level LOD is often very different in structure to the higher LOD meshes, so when the higher LOD mesh is streamed in the geometry transforms to the higher LOD on terrain (landmass flexes) but for static meshes such as rocks and trees, these all pop in, often very late. A good draw distance goes hand in hand with a good distance LOD and smooth transition between low LOD and high, an average distance LOD with choppy transition and pop in for static meshes results in exactly what I said, "an unimpressive draw distance".

Having mountains/buildings that are low LOD realy far off in the distance alone, is not impressive, the complexity of the distance LOD and how smoothly it handles transitioning between LOD levels is what makes a map draw distance impressive.

Again, you're talking to someone used to making games, not a gamer, my answers aren't going to be the same as a "gamers" because what impresses the average gamer doesn't impress me, especially when the technical side of it leaves no real reason to be impressed.

Framerate is still choppy at times, especially in battles, however Patch 1.0.1 cleared up a lot of the choppyness the game had when streaming assets when using the optional DLC high quality packs.

Explained, multiple times in detail why my answer specific to skyrim was what it was, based on the technical standpoint, I even went on to further explain it in a following post, too.

I posted this as a bit of fun, and to give a bit of buzz to Nintendo fans excited for the game (boy do we deserve something to look forward to). However this seems to have derailed into something much more serious, this wasn't my intention.